The traditional wedding ceremony has two parts: kiddushin (betrothal) and nisu’in (the finalization of the marriage). Though nisu’in and its seven special blessings that are recited under the wedding canopy merit much discussion, this essay and issue of Sh’ma will focus on kiddushin.

Within the kiddushin part of the ceremony, the groom hands the bride a ring and indicates explicitly that he is doing so with the intent to betroth her and thus performs an act of acquisition, of kinyan. The Mishnah (Kiddushin 1:1) explains, “A woman is acquired [in marriage] in three ways…She is acquired by money, by writ, or by intercourse. ‘By money,’ the House of Shammai maintains, ‘a dinar or the value of a dinar.’ The House of Hillel rules, ‘a p’ruta or the worth of a p’ruta.’” This idea is developed in the Gemarah (talmudic discussion) on this mishnah, when it asks,

How do we know that money effects betrothal? By deriving the meaning of “taking” from the field of Ephron. Here it is written, “A man takes a wife” (Deuteronomy 22:13) and there it is written, “I give you money for the field; take it from me” (Genesis 23:13). Moreover, “taking” is called acquisition, for it is written, “the field which Abraham acquired” (Genesis 49:30). Or, alternatively, “They will acquire fields with money” (Jeremiah 32:44). Therefore, it is taught, “A woman is acquired”… The mishnaic voice initially uses the language of the Torah [that is to say, of acquisition] and at the end uses the language of the rabbinic tradition [that is to say, of kiddushin]. And what does the language of the rabbinic tradition connote? That he [the groom] makes her forbidden to all [men] [miKuDeSHet] like something that is heKDeSH. (Kiddushin 2a-2b)

The text tells us that a woman is acquired in the betrothal ceremony, which is now performed as part of a wedding, in very much the same way that one might acquire a field — using the same means: money. This text also makes explicit the meaning of kiddushin. Contrary to popular sentiment that kiddushin derives from kadosh, to sanctify and render holy, [l’KDSH], the betrothal ritual is a way of dedicating the woman (making her hekdesh), rendering her forbidden to other men, just as an object dedicated (made hekdesh) to the Temple is forbidden for all other purposes.

In contemporary practice, this acquisition is generally executed by kinyan kesef [acquisition through money], most commonly by the groom’s placing of a ring (worth the value of a p’ruta or more) on the bride’s finger and reciting a formula of dedication/acquisition. The bride need not utter a word, as her silence is understood to be consent.

What is this acquisition? Some argue that the groom purchases the bride, noting the Mishnah and Talmud’s parallels to the acquisition of a slave, animal, or land. Others argue that he acquires not her entire being, but rather her sexuality, the right to monogamy. Still others argue that he acquires not her, but rather the obligations of husband to wife, including those to feed, clothe, and have intimate relations with her. (There is no parallel acquisition by the wife of the husband.)

Even in the best possible scenario, this process is decidedly unequal. The groom is actor and agent, acquiring responsibilities, and while the bride’s consent is required, her speech is not; she can be entirely passive. Few would agree that the husband’s acquisition of a wife is in accordance with our contemporary understanding of what marriage is or should be. Needless to say, the ritual also presumes the heterosexuality of the partners — their gender roles are necessary and built into the mechanisms at hand.

This issue of Sh’ma highlights some of the recent work on the kiddushin problem. Is there any way to have an egalitarian wedding ceremony in which nobody is acquired or, possibly, both partners acquire each other? What about a ceremony where both partners are actors, where gender is not the defining feature of the relationship or the ritual meant to formalize it? What recognizable features of the wedding ceremony might be adapted? How, and to what extent? At this point, there is no standard, no authorized formal ritual that a couple might undertake under the wedding canopy; we’re early in this process of study and experimentation. And given the range of ideas and attitudes about Jewish law, there may never be such a standard.

In rabbinical school, I became interested in this question and began cataloging through a blog* some of the approaches I was hearing and reading about and stumbling upon in my research; it was a way to make space for discussion and debate, to air the pros and cons, the problems and the potential applications of the various ideas being proposed. This, after all, is the age-old process through which Judaism grows, evolves, and reveals itself again and again.

The chuppah, or marriage canopy, is often likened to the home that the chatan and kallah, the groom and bride, are embarking on building together. However, not all traditional sources support this view. Halakhic sources depict the chuppah as a home, but it is a home that belongs to the chatan, and its role in the ceremony is to mark the transfer of the woman from her father’s house to her husband’s house. One must look to the aggadic sources for a view on the symbolism of the kallah’s entry into the chuppah that is more in line with our modern sensibilities. Within the aggadah, the chuppah represents the beginning of a mutual and equal relationship between the chatan and kallah, who are on the verge of establishing a home together.

The dominant view in halakhic sources is that the chuppah is the reshut, or domain, of the chatan, and this is why he enters it first and then brings the kallah into his home. According to the Shulchan Arukh (Even Ha-Ezer 55:1) the marriage has only taken place once the bride has entered his house, which in the halakhic sources is the symbolic purpose of the chuppah. This symbolism seems to be further reinforced by the minhag (a custom in which my husband and I partook at our own wedding) that the chatan enters the chuppah and then comes back out when the kallah arrives, in order to accompany her inside. This minhag is widely understood as representing the woman’s leaving the domain of her father and entering the domain of her husband. It is as though the groom, being a good host, greets the bride and says, “Welcome to my home.”

This interpretation of the chuppah can be extracted from certain aggadic (non-legal narratives) as well. When bnei Yisrael were about to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai, the midrash states that Moshe told the people to leave the camp and go to the mountain because God, the chatan, was waiting to meet His kallah, the people, in order to accompany them into the chuppah (Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer, chapter 41). A similar image can be found in the liturgy of Kabbalat Shabbat, “L’cha dodi likrat kallah,” “Come, my beloved, to meet the bride.” Like the halakhic sources, these aggadic texts portray the encounter at the chuppah not as a mutual meeting, but rather as the bridegroom’s welcoming the bride into his house.

The Song of Songs and the aggadic sources that expound upon it provide a different perspective on the role of the bride at the chuppah. The book in and of itself is understood by most commentaries as an allegory for the loving relationship between the nation of Israel and God, in which Israel is portrayed as the bride and God the groom. In Chapter 4, the bride sings out to her husband:

Awake O north wind, and come south;
blow [haphichi] upon my garden [gan], so that [the smell] of the spices may flow out.
Let my beloved come to his garden and eat from its choicest fruit.
I have come to my garden, my sister, my bride…

The kallah refers to the garden first as hers (my garden), and then as his (his garden). Only in response to the kallah’s offer does the beloved accept her overture and call the garden his own. Moreover, it is the kallah who is in the chuppah first, awaiting the arrival of her chatan.

Based on these verses, the midrash makes a statement that is radically different from the perspective found in the halakhic sources:

Rabbi Hanina says, the Torah teaches you appropriate behavior [derekh eretz], that the chatan should not enter the chuppah until the kallah gives him permission [reshut], as it says, “Let my beloved come to his garden” (Shir Hashirim 4:16) and afterward it says, “I have come to my garden” (Pesikta deRav Kahane, Chapter 1).

The need for the permission (reshut) of the kallah, as it is expressed in this midrash, suggests that the chuppah need not be viewed exclusively as the reshut of the chatan. Rather, it is a shared, mutual dwelling into which they are both about to enter for the first time. One can then interpret the minhag of the chatan meeting the kallah and accompanying her into the chuppah in an entirely different way. The concept — that the consent of the kallah must be granted before the wedding ceremony in the chuppah begins — alters the symbolism of this minhag. The minhag is no longer about the transfer of the woman from one man’s space to another’s, but rather is representative of the voice of the kallah, whose message is that she is ready to enter into and share a new home with her chatan. Instead of representing the striking absence of a role for the kallah at the chuppah, it symbolizes her noteworthy presence.

These sources make clear that different interpretations of the minhag can be drawn by different communities. From the halakhic material, one may derive a more traditional view of the chuppah as symbolic of the husband’s domain and the bride’s movement from her father’s to her husband’s house. The midrash and Shir Hashirim, on the other hand, offer a view of marriage as a joint endeavor, in which both individuals participate and share responsibilities. Far from representing the woman’s transfer from one domain to another, the chuppah in these sources signifies a home built on joint consent and mutual involvement.

Let me say this straight-out: I don’t keep kosher. I never have and, truthfully, I don’t ever intend to. My family is culturally very Jewish, but when it comes to following specific rituals and laws, our penchant for skepticism and rebellion tends to win out. Why, then, would I write an article about the very laws I like to ignore? Primarily, my deep commitment to and love of food. Food has taken me to Bologna, Italy, a place where food is more a way of life than a simple source of nutrition; through the hot, sweaty kitchen of one of New York’s best-known restaurants; and, most recently, to a small farm in rural Vermont, where I shoveled manure, threw hay bales, and chased sheep into their pasture in exchange for a chance to eat food right out of the ground. If food could motivate such travels, surely it could bring me to contemplate a set of laws so integral to my religion. I wanted to understand these laws and see if, kashrut cynic that I am, even I could discern in their midst some life lessons.

Last Thanksgiving, I made a choice that evoked endless questions and discussions, garnering equal amounts of heartfelt praise and sincere disgust: I slaughtered my own turkey. When November rolled around, I decided to head north from New York to the farm in Vermont where I had lived the previous year to help with the slaughter of 26 home-grown turkeys. I knew I wanted to serve one of those turkeys at my Thanksgiving dinner, supporting my farmer friends and feeding my guests the most natural, organic, free-ranging turkey I could find. Originally intending to buy the bird already beheaded, defeathered, and ready to roast, ultimately I decided to take more responsibility for the turkey’s demise. I had spent the better part of my summer and fall raising this bird; I felt I should see the animal through both its life and death. Just as I had ensured that it lived a good life, I wanted to give it a quick and humane end, acknowledging everything required for this bird to become dinner.

The rabbis created the laws of kashrut because they understood that the questions of what and how we eat are fundamentally linked to the notion of who we are. By setting up dietary boundaries, kashrut formed Jews’ collective identity, strictly separating them from their surroundings and reminding them to treat every meal as sacred. That Thanksgiving turkey, and the meal surrounding it, became the most sacred meal I have ever eaten. It was a clear acknowledgement of who I am and what matters most to me — cooking food that I know for people I love.

In an age when Jews feel relatively secure in our communal identity, I grew up thinking that kashrut just didn’t fit into my life. Although I don’t intend my kitchen to follow the laws of kashrut and I do not separate milk and meat, I have found that the lessons we absorb from kashrut are now, perhaps more than ever, of paramount importance. When so much of our food is prepackaged and bears little resemblance to its origins (before its detour through a lab or factory), we would do well to remember that food is sacred and eating is undeniably an act of self-expression and self-identification. Kashrut asks us to take a step closer to our food: to know where it came from and how it made its way onto our plates, and to acknowledge the process of eating. Viewed in this way, maybe I’m not that far from keeping kosher after all.

Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism by Dvora E. Weisberg, Brandeis University Press, 2009, 246 pp, $70.00.

Reviewed by Leonard Gordon

Kristina Grish’s confident assertion in Boy Vey! The Shiksa’s Guide to Dating Jewish Men, that Jewish men are “generous and thoughtful, thanks to a matriarchal culture that taught them to appreciate women’s strength … and intelligence” resonates as a cultural stereotype. By contrast, the scholar smiles at the presumption of any such entity as “Jewish men,” instead identifying an evolving concept so plastic and contingent as to be virtually meaningless. The two new books reviewed here, Gail Labovitz’s Marriage and Metaphor: Constructions of Gender in Rabbinic Literature and Dvora Weisberg’s Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism, are the work of scholars. This newest generation of rabbinic scholarship revisits the texts of ancient Judaism and exposes the origin of some of our most abiding and egregious prejudices.

Both of these works were published with the support of the Hadassah-Brandeis Research Institute on Jewish Women; the authors reference one another, and both focus on rabbinic literature to question the underpinnings of modern Judaism’s support for the so-called traditional family. Despite these important points of connection, these are very different projects. Labovitz’s close textual analyses emerge from the intersection of linguistic theory and Jewish studies. She forces a confrontation with a metaphoric constellation in rabbinic literature that has abiding consequences for gender roles in marriage. Weisberg, who traces the fate of biblical legislation that requires a man to marry his deceased brother’s childless wife (levirate marriage) through different rabbinic traditions, excavates an early history of one aspect of Jewish marriage and family.

Evoking speech act theory, Labovitz reminds us that language is so pervasively metaphoric that entrenched metaphoric systems become invisible. These metaphors are, however, not benign. For example, the fact that English speakers think about differences of opinion in terms of war (arguments have winners and losers; we marshal evidence and attack one another’s position), has consequences for how we behave and feel when we disagree. Analyzing the texts addressing marriage as kinyan, the purchase of the wife by the husband, Labovitz brings the reader to recognize that this underlying premise of Jewish marriage has a range of enduring implications, from a wife’s lack of control over the fruits of her labor to women’s exclusion from the realm of Torah study.

Labovitz persuasively disputes earlier apologetic characterizations of rabbinic thought and legislation as expanding the freedom and autonomy of women. Instead, she underscores the value and necessity of developing alternative metaphors to replace the classic ones, as author/scholar Rachel Adler does, in constructing new marriage rituals that might better promote the egalitarian relationships to which many Jews aspire.

Weisberg asks what we can learn about rabbinic family values by looking at the extreme situation of levirate marriage (classically articulated in law in Deuteronomy 25:5-10). Here we have a marriage between two partners that under other circumstances would have been seen as incestuous, a perfect case for the early rabbis, who relished the opportunity for the legal gamesmanship offered by marginal cases. Making reference to anthropological data on family relations in a diverse array of cultures, Weisberg finds that the rabbis overturn the Bible’s preference for levirate marriage of release (halitzah), valorizing the needs of the living (including the preferences of the widow) over the claims of the dead. Moreover, Weisberg finds in the history of levirate marriage evidence for a rabbinic preference for the nuclear over the extended family. The smaller unit of wife, husband, and child is given primacy as interpretations that might widen the definition of family are gradually rejected.

It is not an accident that these new forays into rabbinic literature come at a time when we can no longer entertain long popular myths about the stable Jewish family: Jewish husbands do not drink or batter, and Jewish women are devoted, if overbearing, mothers. In the face of increasing divorce rates, as well as a surge among affiliating Jews who come from households that do not conform to antiquated idealizations, in a world of blended families, interfaith and multifaith families, interethnic adoption, fluid gender identity, diverse and changing sexual identities, and polyamorous unions, these myths are weakening. As early as 1989, David Kraemer’s anthology, The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory demonstrated diversity in Jewish families from rabbinic to modern times. We learned about wealthy women who farmed out childrearing to facilitate their work lives and about the “slave girl syndrome” impacting medieval Jewish families.

Weisberg extends this historical research in her informative history of levirate marriage. Labovitz advances the project to a new level, revealing, through her readings, false dichotomies in our thought processes themselves.

I was young once. By my teenage years, as far as I was concerned, I knew everything, what was right and what was wrong. Mine was the only authentic perspective, my perception the only one that saw things as they truly were. Narrowness, conformism, compliance and naïveté surrounded me — and, I promised myself, I would escape it, fight it. I would rectify it all: the world’s unjust distribution of goods and happiness, people’s parochialism, complacency and fears. So I raged. I smashed. Idols fell all around me: religion too timid to change the world, too myopic to challenge evil; a boring, irrelevant yet narcissistic Judaism wallowing in victimization and the past. I swore I would not replicate these mistakes. I yearned for life, energetic struggle, unflinching honesty, the “really real.” I was so much older when I was young, as Eric Burdon and the Animals boasted (or mourned) in a song from the mid-1960s.

I moved on. I left my childhood behind. I suppose I even grew up. Miraculously, I must have wizened somewhat. By my 30s, I had a wife, children, and a career. Some time into my older children’s adolescence, I noticed a pain I could no longer conceal. Someone had entered my workshop and was busily chipping away at much of what I had loved, cared for, and spent so much time and energy building. It was my own children! They seem to have mistaken the treasures that my wife and I had built ourselves for idols: Our environmentally friendly, quasi-hippy ways were deemed aberrant and embarrassing, ineffective and silly; our critique of contemporary capitalism and governmental failures and our search for alternatives were considered cynical; our lack of a television and opposition to much of popular culture were causing our children’s mental and social debilitation. Worse still was the fact that the serious yet easygoing, communal, neo-hasidic Judaism that my wife and I had nurtured as haven and inspiration fit neither into proper conventional Judaism nor rational secularism. We were aberrations — stupid, backward, and superstitious; religious tyrants imposing groundless beliefs on those less powerful. Terachs, indeed.

Our domestic intergenerational conflicts evolved into a routine of sorts. I realized that it was not my idols (ideals) that were being smashed. It was me. I had become the idol; I had become the towering statue of a false and tyrannical dictator. My orientation, values, and beliefs could not be separated from my essence; they were me. I had become the piñata whose breaking would shower confidence, freedom, independence, and legitimacy on my children as they sought their own promised lands. Indeed, only my breaking would bestow such sweet benefits. No wonder every blow to my religiosity, to my priorities, to my tastes felt like a mortal wound. That may have been their aim.

On occasion, usually but for a flitting moment, it dawns on me that I am also — however impossibly, however necessarily — the god who watches the scene in the idol workshop unfold. Detached, I take in the combatants, their claims, their animosities, their furious battles, their casualties. I understand, and empathize with each party. I recognize that in some cases only the impure ashes from the conflagration itself can bring about purification, that the seed shell must be allowed to decay for the seedling to sprout, that the ideals of the parents can become the idols the children must shatter. These lessons, to be found in any number of books, I only really learned and internalized from the toughest teacher of all, experience. Becoming a parent had broken through my narcissistic blindness to perspectives other than my own childish one. My failures had kindled the intelligence of withholding judgment regarding the failures of others. Coming out stronger (sometimes) from difficulties awoke the recognition that unknown powers within could indeed be found and tapped. At good moments, then, my “higher self” is ready, even willing to have my children break me apart for their own sake. After all, who am I to demand absolute respect? Should the life I helped fashion be immune to criticism? To give life lovingly, surely I can survive a little disobedience, some insults, some bitter resentment. Haven’t I already surmounted a thousand little deaths with resurrections of sorts?

Rarely, though, is my less-transcendent self capable of such detachment. With great sadness, I see that the smashing of idols has itself become an idol. American pop culture, modernity in general — in some sense even certain ways of being Jewish — seem fixated on destroying parental idols and ideals, unable or unwilling to sift through what is handed down by previous generations for wisdom, intent on wholly remaking the world anew. The idols may well have deserved reshaping, and the truth is that not all parents parent well, but the conflict has left us a world littered with the shards of countless broken hearts. How difficult it can be to consider the pain we have caused, that has been caused to us, that we continue to cause — and to move forward still.

With time, my children will grow, will become even wiser. They will craft their own ideals. One day, I hope they will recognize, as I have come to learn from the revolving mirror of life in which I periodically glimpse myself — that the clay that forms these new idols and ideals comes from the dust of the shattered old ones, that our unknown inner powers were likely, as not, sown by our parents.